


The Offering

by folie_a_yeux



Category: Ancient Lesbians, Greek and Roman Mythology, The Iliad - Homer, The Odyssey - Homer
Genre: Dom/sub Undertones, F/F, F/M, Feminist Themes, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Hate Sex, LGBTQ Female Character, Queer Themes, Tenderness, a new meaning for ariadne, bisexual queens, lesbehonest, matter manipulation, one sappho poem at a time, remember that pallas myth, that will come in handy, virgin goddess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 07:18:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folie_a_yeux/pseuds/folie_a_yeux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loving a goddess is not like loving mortal flesh. There is ecstasy. There is communion. But there is no yielding, no safety, no forgiveness. There is only offering, and taking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Offering

Her lungs burned from the flesh of yearling lambs.

Penelope of Ithaca strode into the blinding sun. The indolent sea lapped waves against the island, deceptively calm. Not one day had begun otherwise, for twelve long years — a soft, languorous ocean, churned to a fevered assault by nightfall, lashing the island for a crime no seer could name.

Twelve years, and no Ithacans had come home. Only men of every city-state and province with enough coin to scrape passage on a passing ship. Men angling for the bed of a queen, and the jewels that came with it.

She sighed, one long hot stream of frustration and want. She knew, even as her green eyes swept the shoreline, that no painted eyes waited over the cliffside, no white-gold banners swallowing the breeze. Not promise but the cruelty of habit forced her gaze, habit which tastes like hope until the ashes settle in the back of your throat.

But Philoctetes… Philoctetes had been different.

Named for his mother’s master, the sharp-tongued boy whose sharp arrows earned a place serving Sparta against Troy.  She never thought the flock would get low enough, never so low that she’d have to give him to the gods. Never thought her husband’s credit, so strong in the early years of the war, would wane so much when the ships failed to dock. That the suitors, as expected and unwanted as wolves, would gorge themselves so fully on her larder that nothing would be left after almost a decade of feasting. Hospitality demanded she not turn them out, no more than she could turn away the local wives, widows in all but name, who begged outside the kitchen door.

Stifling. Unbearable. Even Telemachus was lost to her now, fled from would-be lovers in search of a father he would never find. Odysseus was dead.

 “He is alive.”

A young woman’s cadence, unrecognized, unrecognizable. Had she been younger, even a year less in age, Penelope might have turned with her heart in her eyes, light brown curls spinning, sure this girl was a messenger, sure a ship had docked.

She took up the speech-mantle of a queen, fury at the girl’s lies forming on her lips, and turned to face her.

But this creature was no girl.

Woman and deity, spirit and flesh, like twin reflections blurring the overlap. Her dark brown hair did not fly with Poseidon’s breath, tangled by the sea, but wafted lightly in its own breeze, never obscuring the fair face with its straight nose, full lips, and clear grey eyes. Her gown shivered with the heat of a mirage, and her shepherd’s staff sharpened to a point deadly as a spear. The words of censure still bubbling up Penelope’s throat choked themselves on her lips.

“Athena,” she breathed. The grey-eyed. The wise one. The unbending and unbroken.

And to her complete surprise, and belated chagrin, Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, Servant of the Gods, laughed aloud, and said: “You’re not even trying.”

 

***

Penelope had never been a true beauty, not with her cousin Helen before her. Her tongue had earned her censure, rarely approval. But her stranger-husband was different.

She had always been bound to the man who won her from her father. Respected his strength, admired his cunning, been drawn by his words, the mind she had tried to unravel before learning to revel in its tangles and snags. Craved his touch. But she had never allowed herself to be in love with Odysseus until he had allowed himself to leave her.

She had performed the rites that promised safe voyage. She had held herself up until the soldiers turned to their own wives, and then she had thrown herself into his waiting arms. The musky scent of wood and oiled leather had enveloped her strength, bound it up in his arms, and as he buried his face in her hair she bit the cloth on his shoulder, crushing him to her. She felt her mind release its fear and desperation. It flowed from her into him.

And it had happened.

An old woman, wincing and limping her way through the crowd.  Nothing to separate her from the hundreds of women losing half themselves to Troy. But she had lifted her skirts as the sea came in, and it was when she raised her tattered cloak that Penelope saw her feet weren’t touching the ground.

She must have made some sound, some small gasp. Or perhaps gods can sense even the smallest thoughts, the second they enter a mortal’s mind. The woman looked up, caught her green eyes in her grey ones, and held her. She could not move. She couldn’t even breathe.

And in that moment, Penelope felt another mind, an unbearably stronger mind, seep through and illuminate her own, and her very mortality draw towards the creature, the goddess, like water through the strains of a sieve.

It was beyond breathing. It was beyond pain. It was beyond rapture.

But somehow, she had drawn back. She had closed her eyes, slammed closed the panes of her psyche against the radiance on this Un-being. A soft, strangled cry tore at her throat, and the rush of the crowd, the crash of the sea, the heat of fat and fire, all came flooding back.

She was gone.

Penelope had encountered a goddess, a creature beyond woman or demon or soul. To be alive, to be at once tasted and untouched by such a divine being, left a sore in her body that chafed and burned. It was unbearable, this imprint of intrusive, intoxicating presence. It was the first time she’d kept something from Odysseus, the only brief moment she’d felt her mind and her king’s had met a barrier she could not cross.

She told herself it had been an accident, an unlucky instance when a mortal discovers a god who does not wish to meet a welcome. To dwell on such things invited madness. A goddess’s attention. A goddess’s fury.

But she had seen what lay beneath the goddess’s eyes. She had spoken it in her mind, as clearly as the goddess had given her name.

It was possession.  

***

“You’re not even trying.”

And yet there was so little to draw from, so little to show that this girl was older than everything around her, more powerful and more beautiful than anything Penelope could have seen or imagined. Nothing to show that this child could destroy everything in her path, set fire to that ground and make bleed the sky above, from little less than the desire to do so.

 _She can destroy you,_ Penelope reminded herself. _She can do much worse. Remember your place. Remember your temper._

The goddess’s eyes flashed, the color and movement of a sword hammered from steel. Penelope raised her chin, met those eyes, and held them.

Athena smiled.

Under the gown armor appeared, silvered and supple. The wooden staff bent wicked at the corners. Her hair fell long and luxurious behind her, streaming back out of a glorious helmet of moonstones set in gold. Her shield was strapped to her muscular back, but it did not bend her over nor fix her in place; it was as much a part of her as the hand that grasped her spear, as the mouth that curved her red-brown lips.

And then it was gone. Her spirit folded back into the body before her, and only the mask remained, observing a shaken queen whose legs were buckling under her.

“You see better than a mortal should.” Athena spoke the words in reproach. “Though I wasn’t trying. Not then.”

Her tongue found her, barely. “My husband—”

“He is alive. For now.”

She gestured past the rocky peak to the cold ocean beyond, glittering under Helios’ rays. “The war is over, Queen of Ithaca, but Odysseus is not returned. The sea hates him. Poseidon hates him. My uncle does not forget, and he does not forgive.”

Penelope drew a ragged breath. “What has he done?”

Amusement on the goddess’s face. Chagrin. Perhaps even a bit of pride. “What all the cunning do. He bragged.”

She could not meet those eyes again, those terrible circles of steel and heat. She could barely keep back tears.

 “You will not let this happen,” she said, her gaze fixed on the hem of the goddess’s dress. “You have no love for the sea god. Odysseus has always been your favorite. You will not abandon him—“

“You speak without right.” Her tone was cold. “These are matters for the gods, and the men who love and hate them. I cannot defy my uncle for Odysseus, not openly.” She softened. “But neither will I abandon him.”

Penelope rose her feet, legs still shaky as a newborn calf’s. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Don’t.” The word fell like an axe blow. “Goddesses are not known for selflessness. The children of Zeus never give anything without a price. My motives are anything but pure.

Gray eyes pierced her, frank and appraising. “I am unknown to man, god or mortal. It is the mark of a warrior’s life, a leader’s burden, of a guide’s path. And I have never desired one of them, not in a millennia of existence. No mortal ever tempted me, until I visited Ithaca’s shores.”

She knew the only thing she should feel was resignation. So this was the price she had to pay, the loss she must bear to gain what she desired. A life for a love. A husband’s salvation for a goddess’s desire.

 “No.”

Penelope felt all the rash and futile anger of mortal blood scorch her veins. Felt, for the first time since her burden had been to wait stoic and honorable and sad, the glorious suicidal stirrings of defiance.

“I will not let you have my husband. As long as I live, until you spill my blood upon these rocks, he will be mine, and mine alone upon this earth.”

She straightened her spine. “You may be your father’s daughter, but you do not scare me.” How regal, to end her life with a lie. Her husband would be proud.

She closed her eyes, and waited.

“Penelope.” A voice like a caress, a touch light as a kiss of rain. She felt a hand cup her cheek, a goddess’ laughter tickle the hair on her neck. “My brave child.” Lips brushing her ear, fingers stroking her neck.

“It’s not him I want.”

It no longer mattered that her eyes were closed, that her ears were deaf to the outer world, that her legs no longer felt the ground beneath her. She was blinded beyond sight, feeling beyond sensation. She could see every blade of grass in Ithaca. She could smell the incense from all the temples in Greece. She could taste the ambrosia of a hundred chalices, and the salt of a thousand ships’ bones wrecked before Troy.

And she could feel. Feel the fingers shudder up her thighs. Feel lips' teasing breath at the back of her neck. Feel the hands caressing her breasts, her stomach, the insides of her thighs. Every embrace, every thrust and give and arching back, every memory of the men and women of Ithaca enflaming and shuddering and enveloping her. A delicious burning, racing her blood as her hips bucked, as a shiver raced from the curve of her shoulders to the heat between her legs.

Terror and ecstasy. Madness and illumination. Taut and released. Beyond pleasure now, beyond endurance. Illuminated.

 _Be with me, Penelope of Ithaca_. The words reverberated through her like a lyre. _My bold, bright mortal. My strong, beautiful queen._ She moaned, one low, agonizing murmur, as wind and warmth caressed her. _Let me take this from you. Let me love the mind that conquered Odysseus’ heart. Let me love the body that bore Ithaca its son._

No way to resist, to break free even if she dared. No more choice than Europa and the bull, than Leda and the swan. Her father’s daughter. Her father’s ways.

_No._

Abrupt it washed over her, through her, carrying her in its wake. _I may be my father’s daughter. But I am not my father._

And suddenly alone. Emptied. Abandoned. Athena staring down her, eyes bright and molten and so much more than alive.

“I am not my father,” she repeated. “If you do not want me, I will not take you. Not until you welcome me yourself.”

A strangled sound escaped Penelope’s lips. Athena smiled. Tender as a lover. Wicked as a Fury.

“But you do. And you will.”


End file.
